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A google ranking problem

Thought I would try SEOMoz out for a while and I am going to dive straight into my initial problem.

I have my client moving up nicely in local Google search within my country but the problem is he seems to have actually slipped down a place when I search on google.com/ncr. (and on Rank Tracker)

He does sell locally but is a worldwide supplier of his product and wants to obviously rank well everywhere.

I understand why he has moved up locally but don't get the shift down internationally.

So,

1. If everyone's Google is forcing local search results on everyone, how do you market better internationally.

2. Noticed that his competitors are all getting clever and now using keywords in their URL. Two guys are new on first page Google just because they have Keyworded urls. (killing me). The one guy has one backlink!! (although the client does have a keyworded URL stashed away but we don't want to got that route because we like to keep things 'white hat')

The client is happy because when he searches he see's his site moving up nicely but I have a conscience and I am going to have to tell him whats going on. (that his Google is showing local results)

4 Responses

There could be a number of factors affecting your rank in Google.com compared to your local Google search engine. Ultimately, Google will return results it believes are most relevant to the particular country. If there are strong local indicators on your website (local hosting, local domain extension such as .co.uk, localized content, links from local domains, setting a geographic target in webmaster tools) and very few international indicators, then you cannot expect to rank well for both Google.com and your local Google.

On a side note, having keywords in urls is not black hat and is even encouraged to help pages rank. I think you may be confusing keywords in a url e.g. http://www.company.com/keyword with exact match domains e.g. http://www.keyword.com. However, the use of either is not considered black hat seo. It is worth noting that exact match domains are receiving less importance from Google in serps in preference to brand sites.

Sorry when I meant 'white hat' it was more about keeping it on his brand name where as the other guys are using keywords and not their brand names. Almost having two sites. I have just updated keywords in some of our urls. Was more the home pages (www.keyword.com, we do use www.brandname.com/keyword )

I wasn't aware that that exact keywords are receiving less importance these days.

And he is on a .com and I have been trying quality links from both U.S and European sites to make it more international.

Do you think using Google places affects things? After all it places you squarely on a map.

I do think that there is going to be an even more local bias in search results; and we will see a lot more of the phenomenon that you describe above ie.a site going up in local/ country-specific results while going down in international results. While it will not be impossible to rank highly globally, it has and will continue to become a lot more challenging to do so, especially for terms that are quite competitive.

To market better internationally - or specific geographic markets, you may need to give those geo signals to Google, which could be having country-targeted pages on the site; geo-targeted sub-domains/ sub-folders or even separate websites targeted at a market that you are targeting.

Regarding the second issue, if I understand you correctly,having keywords in the url isn't bad/ black hat-- it is perfectly legitimate and recommended (though not necessarily a must-have). So, if it doesn't involve a whole lot of re-development and you feel that is making a huge difference in the space you are operating, then you should go for it.

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